Andy Burnham's housing plans don't add up. Here's why

In his impassioned, promise-heavy speech to the Labour Party conference, Andy Burnham doubled down on his commitment to make housing a key priority. He reiterated his plan to launch “the biggest council house building programme since the post-war era”, telling the audience he would help councils to build again by bringing forth unused public land. He would reform the Right-to-Buy, so new social homes were not lost to the private sector in numbers that have caused devastation over the last four decades.

Then he drew his gaze wider. He promised to restore “the public housing stock to what it once was, not just by building new but acting on the private rented stock too”. That meant new laws allowing councils to take ownership of rented properties left in appalling condition by rogue landlords, and powers to bring empty homes back into use.

The pioneering social housing boss and former banker Andy Hulme wants to believe Andy Burnham. It’s the first time in Hulme’s twenty year career that a government has not only agreed to build large numbers of new social homes, but has also coughed up the money to pay for them.

The first £10bn in funding for new social homes was handed out to councils and housing associations in August. “How could you sign up to anything lower, when there’s 1.3 million families on the housing waiting list and 200,000 children in temporary accommodation?” asks Hulme. He also knows that there’s a catch. “It’s a massive goal,” he says, and one “that’s kind of impossible.”

Hulme used to finance new homes at Lloyds. He’s now chief executive of Hyde Housing, a 130,000-property social landlord, which builds and manages social homes. The problem is not that the government is short of vision, or political will, or even cash. It’s that every bit of the development process takes a huge amount of time and more money than ever before.

The numbers are startling. Hyde recently built eight flats for social rent in Lambeth. The process of obtaining all of the necessary permissions has “taken two years of planning and cost £300,000,” says Hulme. “That can’t be right.”

The government has made major changes to the planning system, making more land available for housing and speeding up local decisions to get homes built. But councils and housing associations are also dealing with new rules on development. These include rules on efficiency standards and the higher safety expectations rightfully imposed after the Grenfell tragedy.

They are also loaded down with the cost of bringing their existing properties up to a decent standard following the introduction of Awaab’s Law, which tackles poor quality social housing including damp and mould.

There’s nothing happening in the process that you wouldn’t go out to defend, but it all takes time and a lot of money. The Bank of England reported earlier this year that new-build housing activity had stalled amid weak demand, elevated construction and funding costs, and planning delays.

“This is, say, £100m for our organisation that we’ll be investing to deliver [new homes],” says Hulme. That will be happening at a time when companies are dealing with “relatively diminished balance sheets with historically thin margins”. “There has to be a real sort of sophisticated dance to balance all of those things.” That’s before you even get to the problem of materials and labour. Who is going to build these homes, and with what?

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According to the government’s own projections, the new housing construction sector is expected to grow by 9% in 2027. But the latest figures released in June found that the output of bricks, tiles and other construction products is down 8.4% year-on-year, while the production of cement, concrete and related products is down by 14.7%.

The global supply chain is fragile and the costs of materials are rising weekly. Hulme describes a time when sign-off for new homes was stalled because new shower screens were stuck half way down the Panama Canal.

The government’s own reports show how dependent the UK has become on international supply to build properties at home. In 2025, construction material imports were worth £22.6bn, with only 60% coming from the EU. Shipping disruption, geopolitical tensions and economic shifts will all affect whether the necessary cables, insulation and other materials will arrive on time – or at all.

We are also short of people. Industry experts reckon the sector would need around 250,000 additional workers by 2028 just to meet construction demand – and that figure was calculated before taking Labour’s 1.5 million new homes target into account. The government has announced funding to train new construction workers, and some of the development funding for housing associations announced over the summer was allocated on the basis of who was running training schemes.

Yet the numbers remain stark: according to the Federation of Master Builders, 58% of construction firms have struggled to recruit people who have the new building tech skills and 51% have had trouble finding personnel who understand the new building safety regime. The Federation also says momentum is slowing in the sector. The government doesn’t appear to have heard that warning.

And even if all of these issues could be put to one side, it still leaves the knotty politics of it all.

Burnham’s other big idea to get Britain’s economy moving is devolution. That means devolving responsibility to councils that may be under-prepared – or, in the case of some incoming politicians, unwilling – to actually build the necessary homes. One person working with local authorities said the problem Burnham was walking into by focusing on councils taking the lead was “existential”, adding: “Some councils will have all the skills in that space – and some won’t.”

No surprise then that the focus on council housing – as opposed to social housing which is often built and managed by charitable housing associations – seemed to have dropped off the Number 10 Instagram channel when the first tranche of funding was being handed out.

In the David Cameron years, the government warned housing associations that their surpluses had grown too large and they must get building, which (within limits) they did. That’s where all the limited funding for social housing has been funnelled over the last 20 years.

In short, they’re used to doing the job. “Those skills and that memory is still there,” the observer said. “If Andy is taking that away from housing associations, that’s a bit short sighted. We’ve really got to keep the focus on what the housing associations can deliver and are delivering.” The problem is, that makes a less digestible soundbite.

In March, still under the leadership of Keir Starmer, the government stated that it was assessing seven locations for potential new towns and that a further announcement would be made this summer. We are now heading into autumn, and there is no announcement.

The attraction of new towns is that they bypass the issue of local leaders who do not share the government’s commitment to social home building. The political fragmentation of the country means that meeting the housing target, or getting anywhere near it, probably means circumventing the very localism that Burnham stands for and controlling it through big, centralised projects, which also goes against what Burnham represents.

The drawbacks are first that the UK currently has an appalling record on big infrastructure projects, and second, even the ones that go ahead take decades.